• Home
  • Archive
  • About
  • Awards & Media
  • Contact
    • Facebook
    • Pinterest
    • Twitter

Courting Destiny

  • Courting Classics
  • Fiction
  • Mainstream Media
  • New York Stories
  • My Parents
  • Mental Health
  • N. Myrtle Beach

Sign Up For My Weekly Newsletter!

The other 9/11 families

February 23, 2006 By pia

found errors in here.  Needs editing, mostly copy–leaving it up because it’s important to me, and Duke Dawg Doug already commented, and he has the best blog roll in the blogging world.  Waking Ambrose–which I have under Bitter Bierce.  If you’re going to steal friends, steal them from Doug. I always do!  But I share.  And now feel too sick to change anything!

Think the voting for the Koufax might begin soon.  Everybody who reads Courting knows that I love lurkers–just vote for me and BIO.  And if you do or have commented will answer tomorrow

I have written extensively for both Courting and BIO on how 9/11 changed my world.  The next month my mom fell and died. 

Call October, 2001 the month New York ran out of empathy.  When I would try to tell somebody about my mom, I would be told:

 “Had two nephews who died at the Trade Center.”

 “It’s been six days.  Snap out of it.  Think of the younger people.”

To keep myself sane I have been staying away from 9/11 related issues right now.  I am talked out.  I tried finding support groups for people such as myself; unless we lived or worked downtown or knew somebody who died in the attacks, we weren’t eligible for free counseling. 

You know this really is a subject that time heals. Only it doesn’t because people always bring it up.  We spent years having to decide if a color alert was real or not.  Laugh at it, come on, you know they’re never real. So I should know.

And when I would get the free subway rides because the police were looking for certain people I should just laugh that off; as I should laugh off my best friend working in a building considered to be a prime target.

Survival calls for coping and defense mechanisms.  One such mechanism is not to think about 9/11 consciously because it permeates every damn area of my life.  Know too many kids in therapy because they were just old enough to understand.

I have said this before and will say it again though it makes me seem cold and horrible.  The 9/11 families, I can’t imagine what they went through.  But they didn’t have to pay estate taxes, were given counseling and free vacations. and much money.

The rest of us had to file our own taxes among everything else.  Had my mom died two and a half months later, we would have had to pay much less in estate taxes.  Had she died last year, zilch.  But we had to pay, and every week when I would go to to the bank to have something done I would bring everything the people had told me too, the web site said.  But you know, it was never frigging enough. 

Yes 9/11 changed every aspect of my life.  My mom died.  She wasn’t sick; just blind.  I have tried so hard and so long to get over it, and usually I’m fine with it now.  Here’s where I’m supposed to say but I love paying  taxes, I’m a liberal.

Get over it. New York’s a triple taxed state.  Some years I pay more to the state than I do to the feds, so that kids upstate can get a decent education.  The money doesn’t come back here.  The year my mom died, an estate was taxable at $675,000, sounds a lot?  Not if you own a home.

And right, a man yesterday was found to have anthrax poisoning.  My mail was sparodicly delivered for months because of anthrax.  Yet I was supposed to pay the bills whether I received them or not. Oh pay them on the Internet?  That assumes that I had Internet service.  Sparodic also–that was a building or cable problem but they didn’t find the cause for a long time.

Got a deep throat call one day:

 “Hi, just want to tell you that you weren’t crazy.  Your building had a low signal problem.”

People from the cable company were over so much; well the words “problematic,”  and “constant complainer” were often said.  Just when I needed my apartment the most, it was overrun with people from the cable company, people fixing leaks that seemed to happen too often that year, people plastering, people painting.  I wanted my mommy; I got contractors.  Fair exchange.

But sometimes…everything comes cascading down into my head.  I wasn’t worthy enough to be given help.  My mom was just an old lady who lived in the Queens/Nassau border; I live on the Upper West Side

Do you know how hard it is to live in a city that failed you when you needed it most?  I only kept five of my friends.  The rest…well, how dare I mourn my own mother.

So yes I fell out of love with New York. Any place will be better.  But my family has lived here for over a hundred years.  My parents were both born in Manhattan.  It is our city and I do love it.

I have more than earned the right to bitch about New York without mentioning 9/11.   And I understand how hard it was for everybody. I understand that everybody was totally screwed up.  That didn’t give them the right to rip into me.

I don’t want to turn into a bitter horrible person.  I was always a fun person.  9/11 took that from me.  It almost destroyed me because my 9/11 wasn’t the regular 9/11.  I have worked my way back up to some kind of normal

I have been writing light on purpose lately.  It helps me.  And excuse me for being selfish but I like to feel good.  I don’t like to dwell on my problems

Actually that’s not true.  The post, below the bloggers wall one talks about something that affected my life for many years.  Can’t help it if I write funny titles sometimes. Kind of love the phrase “dental bulimic” because it so perfectly explains. It has taken me so many years to be able to talk about that problem.  Writing about it on my blog has helped me immensely.  I hope that it’s helped other people. 

I believe that social issues are politics, and politics are social issues.  That’s my bias.  Had a dental appointment the month before 9/11.  Guess what day I had picked to make new ones?  Yes, really.  The first Tuesday after Labor Day week; always seemed like a good day to truly begin the new year, and I have always thought in terms of school years.

 And then my mom died, and it took me two more years to get up the nerve to face that problem

I will say one more thing.  9/11 showed the extent this administration hates New York.  Took us three years to get the money we were supposed to get.  Maybe there would have been money for pilot programs for people who lost family members around the time of 9/11 but not in the Trade Center.

Montana didn’t need that money.  We did.  And do.  My fixed expenses have gone up 60% in the past four years. Has my income?  Ha.  What seemed more than enough eight years ago when I moved to this apartment, an  apartment I was considered “financially over qualified for” seems not nearly enough now. 

But I was prudent and bought an apartment that I could afford and didn’t have to sell my soul for a mortgage.  But this city, it eats your money.  Don’t know how there are so many rich people who can so easily afford everything.

Don’t worry Cooper, I’m not going to have to move in with you ;-) 

Just please don’t make me a 9/11 poster child, or frame everything that happens in New York around it.  It changed our lives in ways that you can’t imagine. Only people from New Orleans have had it worse–much worse.

But in order to survive we have to not thing about it.  You know, the fabled Brits during the blitz. Only our next attack migh come tomorrow or might never come or it might come in one subway or it might….so sick of it.

I have been trying to reclaim my life; at times I do an incredible job of it.  It’s been four and a half years next month.  I will not live a 9/11 centered life because it satisfies other people in other cities needs.  Please let me finish my recovery my way.

Let a person who lived through it mention it first.  My next door neighbor–she bought and sold three apartments before finally settling here.  The people down the street–never walked into their downtown apartment again.

I know many 9/11 stories. I tell them when I want to.  That is my right, as a New Yorker, a person and a blogger

I will carry 9/11 and 10/13 when my mom fell, in my heart always, it’s a part of me.  It’s in the air I breath, the people I sit next to in the subway and at Starbucks.

Recently wrote about an exhibit at a specialized high school.  Went with some friends, on  a retired k-9 cop who came to the Trade Center later that day, it was where he worked.  The sadness in his eyes after he looked at some 9/11 themed paintings by kids who had just entered middle school when 9/11 happened; it was overwhelming to see his pain compounded by his pain for the kids.

Do you get it?  We can’t think about 9/11 constantly.  We wouldn’t live. 

It’s my right to talk about New York without the backdrop of 9/11.  It’s my right to just be another person who happens to live in a city that lost its grit before 9/11.  So when I talk about that I’m talking about things that were happening before.

Times Square wasn’t magically cleaned up right after 9/11 no matter what that nice radical right lady said about me: “liberals are so mean.,” because I told her that and that if you don’t report a bag on the street without an owner you’re risking your own life and every person arounds life.  So yes life has dramatically changed.  We report bags without thinking.  We accept many things we didn’t before

But don’t ever take my First or Fourth Amendments rights away because then I get truly crazed.  And nobody wants that

Filed Under: 9/11 Tagged With: 9/11

« Bloggers Wall, and Boston Legal
Might visit South Dakota to protest »

Comments

  1. Doug says

    February 23, 2006 at 8:43 pm

    “It’s in the air I breath, the people I sit next to in the subway and at Starbucks.” is a gem of a sentence. I can only imagine being a New Yorker now, and I can only imagine it because I read this site.

  2. jacob says

    February 23, 2006 at 11:03 pm

    I am speechless after this. Bravo.

  3. Ignatius Dedd says

    February 23, 2006 at 11:43 pm

    You are so completely right. NY was dead before 9/11. It was like a cancer patient who also got shot. The interesting NY of the 70’s and 80’s died in the early nineties, for a number of reasons. Last time I visited there, it was pretty much Cincinnati with taller buildings.

  4. Sar says

    February 24, 2006 at 12:26 am

    9/11 was horrible and changed everyone and everything. I can’t imagine the compounded tragedy of losing my mom then too.

    Pia, you need an escape and a pick me up. And I’ve got just the thing for you – my place Friday!

  5. Miz BoheMia says

    February 24, 2006 at 1:40 am

    Great post… I was in Dubai when 9/11 happened… not the best place to be.

    It stripped me of an innocence I never knew I had, of an innocence I will never get back.

    As for living with the “report-the-bag” mentality, that was an unfortunate part of my reality ever since I can remember, courtesy of ETA, here in Spain. It came to America with 9/11 but for the Irish, British and the Spanish, you are raised with such cautions in your head…

    Great post Pia…

  6. josh says

    February 24, 2006 at 3:04 am

    Oddly, what worries me the most about 9/11 is actually the extent to which we seem to have collectively assimilated it. Life in New York became very, very different right after. The temple near me at 79th and Second put up concrete stoppers all around it. I thought, and still think, what vanity! What were they thinking: “Today the World Trade Center, tomorrow the temple at 79th and Second?” But that was not atypical. Suddenly you couldn’t go into any office building in town without photo ID and a brush with security.

    But now… more and more, in the same buildings where I used to have to stop and sign in and show ID, they just wave you up, if you even get the wave… All the people who moved out of New York in the 12 months after 9/11 have moved back. You hardly ever see soldiers in Grand Central anymore. The fate of the WTC site has become just another NYC real estate/political imbroglio, more like the West Side stadium than the Holocaust Museum. Its like a horrible wound that seems to have just totally healed, leaving no scar (save, of course, for that gaping hole in the sky).

    I don’t know what I’d want instead; do I want people not to get in the cab when the driver is a Musllim? Do I want us all living in fear? No, of course not. But if we really have assimilated this thing, then maybe we are just Cincinnati with taller buildings (and, no offense Queen City, but I hope not.)

    And too, I have this nagging feeling that if we’ve returned so much to our pre-9/11 ways, we will have learned absolutely nothing, and you know what they say about people who don’t learn from history…

  7. shayna says

    February 24, 2006 at 8:07 am

    Wow.. pia… wow… I don’t know what to say!

  8. cooper says

    February 24, 2006 at 12:30 pm

    That was brutal in a good way.

Search for your favorite post!

Follow Me!

  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

Sign up Now!

Sign up now and get my latest posts delivered right to your inbox!

About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

Categories

Archives

All material contained herewith is owned by Pia Savage, LLC

Copyright © 2021 Courting Destiny · Designed by Technology-Therapist